


To Forget at Sea

by NervousAsexual



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, Falling In Love, Family, First Meetings, Pre-Canon, Trans Character, i just wanted something fluffy okay, i took stuff the heart said and misinterpreted the hell out of it, thanks dishonored2bama, this person here, who has two thumbs and all the headcanons
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-06
Updated: 2016-11-29
Packaged: 2018-08-29 07:52:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8481505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NervousAsexual/pseuds/NervousAsexual
Summary: Samuel once mentioned he was married to someone with moods like the Wrenhaven, but that was a long, long time ago.





	1. Chapter 1

They met for the first time not long after the empress gave birth to Jessamine I. His first week in Dunwall, really. He was fresh off the boat, finally out of his father’s sight. He had no money to his name when he landed, but he did pick up a five-coin piece in the gutter and somehow found his way inland to a bakery, set back against a tenement building at the end of a rocky street.

Stepping inside was like stepping out of a hurricane—the cold wet wind suddenly cut off by the hot muggy air of the bakery. He knew he was lost because the other customers were mostly housewives, a few maids here and there, each clamoring for the attention of the staff, gesturing to loaves of bread here, pumpkin rolls there. It felt louder than the roaring of the wind and waves. He shrank back into a corner.

That was where she found him, tucked away between a window display of cookies and a rack of day old bread. She deposited a tray of ginger snaps beside him, wiped her forehead and asked, “What can I get for you, sweetie?”

She was tall, taller than he was, with long dark hair and dark brown eyes to match, a beaky nose and a smile that set his heart to thumping nervously.

He put his five-coin piece in the center of his gloved palm and held it out. “What can this get me?”

She picked it up (her fingertips brushed his skin and instinctively his fingers curled in; he stopped them before he touched her again) and examined it, her expression deadly serious.

“Well,” she said at last, “two more of these could get you a nice fresh loaf of rye bread, or two more cents for a day-old loaf. You could get a nice slice of apple pie—well, half a slice, anyway—or find someone to go halfsies with you for a slice of carrot cake.”

His mind was racing. He took a deep deep breath and squeezed a hand over his stomach.

“Or… we do have a special. In honor of Princess Jessamine. Three molasses cookies for the price of one. Just two coin.”

“I…”

“You could get six cookies, have a coin left over.”

“I suppose I’d better do that.”

She smiled at him and took a handful of cookies from the display. She yanked a piece of newspaper from a stack he hadn’t even noticed, wrapped the cookies in a bundle. “Here you are. Let me pull your change, alright?”

Like a lost puppy he followed her to the register, where an older woman with a tight grey bun was wrapping loaves of bread and the woman handed him a coin. He squeezed it tight.

“I’ll… I’ll be going.”

She smiled again and his heart thumped. He clung tightly to the bundle. But as he started to walk away she called out, "Sir? Wait a moment."

He started to turn back, found himself facing a wall, turned back the other way and suddenly there she was, uncomfortably close behind him.

"Stella?" she called over her shoulder. "Cover for me?"

Over his shoulder he saw the grey-haired attendant give them a questioning look (he almost wished she'd refuse), but finally she shrugged and carried on.

The woman put her arm across his shoulder and steered him out the door. He got one last gulp of warm air before they stepped out and the cold instantly enveloped him. He held the cookies tight to his chest--they were still a little warm from the shop.

She steered him off the street, toward the tenement building.

"Sorry," she whispered. "It's just... I thought..." She sighed. "Look, honey, you've got a bit of blood on the seat of your trousers."

He felt the smile form on his icy cold face. His fingers ripped into the newspaper bundle.

"Probably fish blood," he heard himself say. "I work on a fishing boat."

"We'll get it cleaned up."

She must have lead him up a flight of stairs, because her room at the time was two stories up, but in the years to come he never remembered the climb. She locked the door behind him and suddenly they were in a dark room. Ragged drapes hung from the windows, dust gathered in the crevices in the floorboards and at the edges of the two straw mattresses that stood in the back, and buckets of ash, piled high, stood behind the stove. She handed him a quilt.

"Go ahead and change out," she said, and turned away.

He wished he knew what to do, but without thought his body did as she told, wrapping the quilt around him as it did. She was right. The back of his trousers was stained dark with blood. He dropped them to the floor and huddled back in the corner, face aflame. She took the clothes and looked sideways up at him. Neither of them made eye contact.

"Look," she said softly. "I'm not going to hurt you. I'm not going to judge you. And I'm not going to make you do anything you don't want. But... aren't you going to need the underclothes washed too?"

She stepped outside and when she returned with the bucket of water he had left all of the stained layers--and there were a lot of them--in a pile and crouched in the farthest corner, his face buried in the quilt.

She put her bucket of water on the floor and set the clothes in one at a time to soak--all across Pandyssia, it seemed, the process was the same.

They sat in silence for a long time.

"Where are you from?" she asked at last.

He considered his answer. "Does it matter. I'm not going back."

"I didn't mean... of course you won't. There comes a day when you can't take it and you snap, and suddenly here you are, somewhere nobody knows you and you can try to do things the right way for once." Her voice grew deeper, more impassioned. "How do you think I got here?"

He glanced up. She had crouched down beside the bucket, chin in her hand, staring off into the distance.

"Straight from the beaches of Serkonos," she continued. "Couldn't stay there. Just like you, I'd wager. Can't go back. I... I expect they'd kill me if I did."

He swallowed hard and ran a finger over the newspaper bundle beside him. He hadn't noticed before that there was a drawing of the baby princess on the front of the page.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't mean to startle you. It's so easy to get carried away. I'm Ursula. What's your name?"

He turned the newsprint away.

"And I mean your real name. The one you gave yourself."

He said, "It's Samuel."

 


	2. Chapter 2

Ursula hung his clothes up to dry by the fire while he huddled in the dusty corner and tried to pretend the splitting stomachache wasn’t real. He took one of the molasses cookies and tried to chew but it was hard as a rock now.

“Is there somewhere you have to be?” she asked. “Because I could scrounge up some clothes for you if…”

He shook his head. Better that he knew now, rather than try to explain away the blood to his shipmates.

“Alright. Then would you mind if I stepped out? Stella should be good on her own but if our boss steps in and finds out I left she’ll have my head.”

Again he shook his head.

“Alright. Alright.” She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “If you go… stop by and let me know? So I can lock up behind you.”

“Alright,” he echoed. She gave him a smile as she left.

The cramps were always there, always, and for a moment it made him angry. Not that that lasted. It always came back to sick. He rested his head on one of the dusty mattresses and had a nap.

 

When the clothes seemed dry enough he splashed himself with the red tinged water from the bucket, tried to clean himself up as much as he could. He dressed quickly, adjusted the stiff knot of cloth to catch most of the blood—he hoped.

He was preparing himself to step back outside into the cold when the door opened unto him and Ursula, carrying a small wooden basket, came back inside.

“Oh.” She looked surprised to see him. “I thought you’d have left already.”

“I’ll need to find somewhere to bunker down for tonight. Boat leaves early tomorrow.”

“I see.” She shifted awkwardly from side to side. “Would you like something to eat before you go.

He gestured to the bundle of cookies tucked under his arm.

“I just thought that… when Ava and I used to room together back in the day, she would get terrible cramps.”

He pulled the cookies around to his front and held them tight to his stomach.

“I would fix her a slice of bread to make her feel better. If you’ll stay I can fix some for you.”

He knew he should have already gone, but it was cold outside and he still hurt and he really didn’t have it in him to turn down free food. “I’d like that.”

She set down the basket before the stove and perched on the floor beside it. From it she took a loaf of steaming bread. “Fresh out of the oven,” she explained. She broke off a sizeable chunk and opened a jar of something dark and gold and when he realized what it was he tried to stop her.

“Honey is too expensive,” he argued.

“Not to me. We ate it all the time on Serkonos. Cures almost everything. Not quite as good here, but you take what you can get.” She poured a generous dollop onto the bread and presented it to him. “Just try it.”

He did, again, as she said. It was warm and syrupy and so, so delicious. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was until it was gone.

“Feel better?” she asked.

“As much as I can,” he admitted.

She looked at him sideways.

“I can’t get away.” He shrugged. “Even after all this I can’t get away from myself.”

“But you did get away from something.” Her voice was so strong, like the wind on the sea that he looked up. “Even if you didn’t get away from yourself you got away from the old places. Do you know how many people wish they could do what you did? How many people wish they had the guts to even try? You left home with, what, five coin to your name? Sailed on a fishing boat, alone, to Dunwall? That’s fucking incredible. Pardon my language.” Her face flushed the color of a stormy sunrise. “But I know a lot of people who come through here thinking the same thing, down to the word, down to the letter, even. You can do the most absolutely amazing things and all you ever think about is the things you can’t do, and you’ll never be happy that way.”

She stopped to catch her breath and he was silent for a long time.

At last, he went ahead and told her. He told her about a lifetime spent on the shore, about wishing for something different, about the way the world slowed to nothing, about the one awful night he lost in a back alley lined with snow. How he still woke up the next morning to rats nibbling at his fingers and how he quietly decided that if he couldn’t die there was no way he could stay. How he cut his hair. How he learned to fish.  How he worked his way across the water to Dunwall.

She listened carefully and when he was done she told him about five older brothers, about “play fights” and resentment and hate. About anger. About how she dug ditches for months to buy passage to Dunwall and how she swore up and down she was never going to go back.

And when they were finished telling their stories, when she’d cried and he awkwardly held her and rested his chin atop his head, when their stories seemed so tangled together he could never again think of them as separate things, when finally they were quiet, a distant clock chimed quarter til three and even the rats had ceased to stir.

“I have to go,” he said, groggy, climbing to his feet. Although he’d escaped one hell he still, for now, at least, owed his soul to the fishing boat captain.

Ursula looked half gone already.

“Will you come back?” she asked sleepily.

“If you want,” he said.

And she did.

So he did.


	3. Chapter 3

By the second or third time he found himself looking forward to the visits?

He’d been set loose from the fishing boat for the winter and although he didn’t know where he was going to go, what he would do, how he would support himself, he still found himself smiling as he came back to the little bake shop by the tenements.

Stella smiled too when he came inside.

“Ursula,” she called into the back room. “Your suitor is here.”

His face prickled but Ursula appeared in the doorway, grinning at him, and his insides prickled too.

“It’s good to see you again, Sam,” she said, and he had to agree. “Are you staying very long?”

“Until I find some place to spend the winter.”

Ursula took his hand and squeezed it. Her hands were dusty with flour and warm on his cold cold fingers. His insides tingled again.

“I wouldn’t worry about it.” Stella stuck a pipe in her mouth and tore a match from the book she kept jammed in the corner of the register drawer. “The navy will be waiting there to snap you right up.”

“Stella,” Ursula warned.

Stella shrugged and struck a match. “I never lie, dear. That’s how they got my poor dear Deo. They wait for the fishing boats to lay you off, wait until you’re desperate and hungry, then slide in and offer the bare minimum to survive. And of course you take them up on the offer. What choice do you have? Then once they’ve got their hooks in you they drain you dry.”

He said nothing and, not for the first time, wondered how much Stella knew.

“She doesn’t mean that,” Ursula said. “Things are better now.”

Stella threw up her hands. “I’m only trying to pass on the wisdom of my ages. Do with it what you will.”

Ursula turned to him. “Do you want to help me in the kitchen? I can show you how to…” She trailed off. “I’m sorry. Of course you don’t. I always talk before I think about things.”

“No, I’d love to. What are you making?”

“Tartlets. As for the filling, doesn’t matter so much.”

The kitchen was cramped, too small, really, for more than one person, but it smelled of familiar spices, drying firewood. He put back his head and tried to take in all the scents. For the first time in a few weeks he had to clear away the lump in the back of his throat.

He dunked his hands into the bucket of water that stood before the oven. A sack of flour leaned against the wall nearby, with a bag of sugar propped up beside it. The vat of butter sat on the table, but he wondered what she used to measure things.

“Oh, we don’t measure things. I’ve gotten to the point where I can mostly eyeball things.”

“I never learned to eyeball. My grandmother used to. She always told me not to bake with her because I’d pick up her bad habits.

As they set to work folding slabs of butter into the flour, Ursula gave him a sad smile. “Too bad we couldn’t trade childhoods, isn’t it?”

He nodded, but in reality he would never have traded the time with his mother’s mother, not for anything.

They worked in silence for a while. If she hadn’t spoken he wouldn’t have noticed Stella looking over his shoulder.

“You’re pretty proficient at that,” she commented.

Ursula shook her head. “Get that pipe out of here.”

“It’s just a little extra seasoning.”

“Funny, Stel. Funny.”

They would probably have continued to bicker gently but suddenly a voice boomed out, “What is going on here?”

Stella quickly ducked out of the room, and instead of her a small, round, silver-haired man in a top hat and a freshly pressed suit appeared.

“Who told you you could drag your little street friends into my shop?” he demanded.

“I asked if he wanted to help.” To Samuel’s surprise, Ursula kept her eyes on her dough. Her shoulders curled in around her. “I thought he could help.”

“Help what? Spread the cholera?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Williams, sir. It won’t happen again.”

“You’re right about that. It certainly won’t. Now get out.”

Ursula looked up, surprised, then just as quickly ducked back down. “Sir, I’m sorry. I…”

“Out.”

Her shoulders trembling, she started to wipe the flour from her hands, but Samuel reached out and touched her arm. He felt white hot from the inside out.

“There’s no need for that,” he said.

“Are you deaf? This is my shop. If I say she goes, she…”

His voice faltered and fell away as Samuel drew himself up. He was not tall, but certainly taller than Williams, and after months on the water he could have easily lifted the smaller man. He leaned in close.

“You can ask me to leave. That’s fine. I am not anything to you. But she brought you in free labor. You ought to be thanking her. You do not threaten her. Understand?”

Williams blathered something.

“I said, do you understand?”

Williams straightened his hat with a jerk.

“Fine!” he shouted, and retreated out the door.

“Goodbye, sir,” Stella called, tapping her pipe against the counter, but he was already gone.

Samuel turned back to Ursula. She had already returned to the dough.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said.

“I’m not going to stand here and let him talk to you like that.”

“Is that right? Well, what happens when you aren’t standing there?”

He shrugged. “I suppose I’ll just have to always be there, won’t I?”

She shook her head, but he saw her crack a smile. It made him smile too.

His insides were prickling again.

She looked younger here. His age, actually, or slightly older. It was hard to tell, because she fronted as so much older and tougher. He found himself putting an arm around her. He wouldn’t let them. Wouldn’t let anyone hurt her. Would never let anyone hurt her again.

Behind them Stella packed her smoking pipe again.

“Cripes,” she grumbled, but she smiled too.


	4. Chapter 4

He spent the first night crouched in the back corner, on what “used to be Ava’s mattress, before…” but Ursula never finished the thought.

Not once that night did he sleep. Some combination of nerves—that Ursula was lying so close, snoring softly and occasionally mumbling to herself—and worry, however irrelevant, that Williams might materialize and he would again have to stand up to him kept him from dozing off. Surprisingly, he felt pretty good.

In the morning, he offered to walk her down to the bakery.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Samuel.”

So instead he wandered off into the chilly, early winter air. Dunwall was coated in the finest layer of frost. All throughout the streets it was already marred with footprints, some big, and others so small children must have made them. Slipping and sliding through the slush, he made his way back down to the docks. For a handful of coin he spent the day unloading bags of wheat and corn from a cargo ship direct from Moray.

It felt amazing. Surrounded by men, working in silence, no one bothered him. The work wasn’t easy but it did feel good.

They finished up near the dinner hour, having worked through any daylight meal time. He made his way back to the bakery in the growing dark. Felt good. Dropped a five-coin piece in the tin cup of an elderly one-legged beggar, who leaned against a street lamp and shivered.

“Bless you, sir,” the man called after, and that felt even better.

Rather than enter the bakery he took a seat on the steps of an old tumble-down church, across the street and a few doors down. There he sat until the streets were dark and empty and the lantern in the bakery window was extinguished. Williams was no where to be seen.

“Very nice,” Ursula said when he showed her his earnings. “And no sign of the Navy anywhere.”

They climbed the steps to her room. He didn’t tell her that in fact the Navy sounded exciting, like an adventure.

“We had a good day.” Ursula hung her shawl from the doorknob. “Every winter is like this. At the first hint of snow they all come running.”

Hovering over the stove, rubbing the backs of his arms, he nodded. Suddenly he was feeling that long, sleepless night.

“I love the snow. We never got much on Serkonos, so the first winter here—two years ago? Three?—I about lost my mind. It looks so soft and fluffy and it reminds me of duck down. I used to raise ducks, back home. My next-oldest brother and I took care of them. They’re actually not very nice as far as domestic birds go.”

He smiled and nodded and listened, but he only ate part of the cheese tart that she offered him before he dozed off before the fire.

 

When his eyes opened the next morning Ursula was already gone. He himself was still fully clothed, but the quilt was tucked in around him and his boots stood drying beside the stove.

Still he felt happy, but as he waited for the quarter hour to chime and tell him how late it was, he fell, once again, asleep.

 

False start, he told himself when he crawled out of bed some time later. He folded up the quilt. It was really  quite a nice quilt, patterned in the traditional wedding ring style. He tucked it in under Ursula’s blanket on her own bed. Did she know how to sew? he wondered. If the stitching ever came loose he could fix that. It felt good to have a purpose, to maybe someday be of use to somebody.

The sun was already low in the sky. He fed the fire a bit from a pile beside the stove. Stretched a bit. He hadn’t been alone in the room for some time. Took a look around. Found it looking, well, a little unkempt. Fetched a bucket of water from the well down the street.

The entire climb back up he had to wonder why. As a child he had loathed housework. There was a reason he’d chosen to go to sea.

He threw the water against the floor, took down Ursula’s cleaning rag from where it hung above the stove. It looked like an old diaper. It probably was an old diaper.

Trouble was, dusty floorboards were all the same. Every few days the same sight, the same dust, and nothing changed. The water… the water was never the same.

He scrubbed the floor as best he could, stopping every few minutes to shake the splinters from the rag. Another of those annoyances that came with the job. When he had hung the rag to dry again, he noticed a few dropped stitches making a run up one side of Ursula’s blanket.

She found him some time later, fixing the blanket—not with a crochet hook (neither of them owned one), but instead with his fingers. “Is there anything you can’t do?”

“Can’t stop bleeding every few weeks,” he said, and immediately regretted speaking. That was far too personal. Far too… far too disturbing. Ugh.

Ursula shook her head. “I wish I could trade you, Samuel. I… I really do.”

He asked, “Will you answer a question?”

“Depends on the question, I suppose.”

“Why do you let him treat you that way?”

She didn’t ask who he meant. There was only one person he could have meant. “That’s just the way he is. He’s mean and small and a bully, and he likes to feel powerful.”

“I wouldn’t…” His face turned red but he pressed on. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d be one to take it.”

“If I were somewhere no one knew me, maybe. But I see him every single day. It would be a bad idea to draw too much attention to myself.”

“Even if that means sticking up for yourself?”

She smiled. “Didn’t we just have this conversation?”

“So I’ll stay. And I’ll stick up for you.”

And, to the surprise of them both, he did.


End file.
